NEW TWIST ON BIOFUEL: African teenaged girls develop urine-generated electricity

NEW TWIST ON BIOFUEL: Urine-generated electricity developed by teenage girls in Africa

Last updated: January 26th, 2019

Every year, a pan-African innovation fair—Maker Faire Africa—is held to promote scientific ingenuity. This year’s fair, held in Lagos, Nigeria, produced some very interesting results.

Four teenage girls, three aged 14 and one 15, developed a way to turn one litre of urine into six hours of electricity. Their system:

1) Separates the hydrogen from the urine;

2) Filters the hydrogen for purification;

3) Removes moisture from the hydrogen gas using liquid borax; then

4) Pushes the purified hydrogen gas into a power generator.

According to Forbes, urine-generated electricity is not a new idea, though this specific design implementation is definitely new.

To deal with potential explosiveness of hydrogen, a major concern for a system such as this, the girls developed a safety measure for their device by using one-way valves. The thoroughness of the safety measure is up for debate, however.

Regardless, it is impressive that such young women were able to implement this unique idea and hopefully this project inspires others to continue research into urine-generated electricity. If scientists can ensure that the hydrogen will not explode by implementing innovative safety measures, urine could be one of the most renewable sources of energy yet. Maybe in the future we could even integrate residential plumbing with electricity generators!

[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]by Fareed Khan

image: justmakeit (Creative Commons BY-SA)